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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

American Anti-Catholicism and the Confessional

American Anti-Catholicism and the Confessional | John B. Buescher | CWR

A brief history of the anti-Catholic rhetoric deployed in the US against the sacrament of Confession.

The highest tides of
anti-Catholic feeling in this country occurred in the 19th century. The standard explanation for this simply
points to Protestant fears that the waves of Catholic immigrants, especially
from Ireland, would take their jobs away.

Anti-Catholicism, as this
explanation goes, was rooted in the Protestant fear that the “trying of swords”
between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism which had reshaped European history
was moving to the continent of North America, and that the Protestant United
States was not only being outflanked and encircled by Catholic Latin America
and French Canada, but that the US was itself being undone from within by
Catholic immigrants, who were simply waiting until they could impose their
anti-American views on the country by their hive-mind bloc voting, controlled
by “priest police.” The most well-known
exponent of this view of the Catholic Menace was inventor and painter Samuel F.
B. Morse, who in 1835 wrote and published Foreign
Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States.

But there was certainly another
aspect of the antipathy to Catholics: they were thought to be essentially alien
in the sense of un-American, that is, they could not or would not be
assimilated to basic American principles of freedom and the common good. Some of this came out into the open during
the battles over the public schools and parochial schools—and Catholics today
may still have some lingering sense of that—but the other place this particular
anti-Catholic rhetoric was deployed was in attacks on the Catholics’ sacrament
of Confession.

Catholic apologist James Chancy
wrote in 1888, “By far the bitterest attacks of the Protestants have been
directed against the Confessional. They
merely scoff at the other sacraments of the Church, but of the Sacrament of
Penance their condemnation is strong, their hate deep, bitter, and lasting.”

Why was their antagonism focused
most especially on Confession? Chancy
continued, “Instinctively they feel this is one of the greatest powers the
Church wields to preserve its members from the contamination of the world, the
continuance of the indulgence of passion, and the taint of heresy.” Unsurprisingly, this was not what non-Catholics
offered as their reason for opposing it so strongly. Confession, to them, was the very sink of
iniquity and foremost danger to the republic.
Today’s Catholic surely would be surprised to learn this. Or to learn that two ex-Catholic priests
carried the banners in the crusade against Confession.